Lying on the ground with her head near the side of a shallow creek, 80- year-old Louise Stutsman had been lost in a ravine in Horseshoe Canyon near Marinwood for four days after embarking on what was supposed to be a simple afternoon hike the previous Wednesday.

Stutsman had been hiking with her younger sister, 76-year-old Doris Radke. The police and the FBI had been notified, but the authorities had suspected the seniors might have made an impromptu trip to Reno, and were treating the case that way. When patrols spotted Stutsman's car near the northern Marin trailhead, the Marin County Search and Rescue team was called in.

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Search and Rescue member Brad Haas, who was 17 at the time and a senior at Marin Academy, found Radke first. Then, with the aid of a trained search dog, along with official emergency personnel, the crew found Stutsman 14 hours later about 300 feet away in a ravine. They were finally able to bring Stutsman to safety. Radke, however, was not as lucky.

"If only the Search and Rescue team had been called in earlier," Debbie Rosenblatt said. "My mother's sister might still be alive."

Three years later, in her Greenbrae home, Stutsman doesn't remember very much about her rescuers -- but feels fortunate that they were there to save her at all.

The hike had started off pleasantly enough, Stutsman recalled. It had been a warm summer afternoon in Marin. Then something went terribly wrong -- the experienced hiker and her sister became disoriented and hopelessly lost.

After a while, the sisters had become separated. Stutsman, an experienced speed-walker, hiked in circles for hours, trying to follow the direction of where she thought a house would be. What Stutsman remembers is finally giving up all hope. What she doesn't remember is taking off her socks, lying down on a makeshift bed of ferns, and then slipping into unconsciousness. That's how she was when the rescue team found her.

It's all in a day's work for the members of Marin Search and Rescue -- who are trained to respond to emergencies at the drop of a hat -- it's actually the signal of a pager with the code "333" -- and to save lives in the process.

The Marin County Search and Rescue team is an all-volunteer group of people who range in age from 15 up into their 60s. Most have day jobs to pay the rent,

some are students, and some are retirees. Their unit falls under the supervision of the Marin County Sheriff's Department -- which provides them with uniforms, equipment and moral support on the often-rigorous searches.

SECRET SUPERHEROES

Like superheroes with secret identities that respond to any emergency, Search and Rescue volunteers say they are ready for anything. Most have jobs, or school -- so with permission from their superiors, they race off to the site of the emergency and set up a command post. If volunteers can't get permission to leave work immediately -- it is important to a rescue scene that they go to the command post as soon as possible.

"It may be mid-afternoon, and you are feeling like it's sleepy time," said SAR member Jim Freed, an exhibit designer and teacher from San Anselmo. "You definitely get into search mode when the pager goes off -- you are all of a sudden ready to go."

"Everyone does it for his or her own reasons," said Freed, who has been a SAR member since 1983. "It's the opportunity to be given such an opportunity at a young age and to be able to run with it. It's something that brings out leadership."

Freed was just 18 when he signed up and went through SAR's rigorous training, which includes an overnight wilderness element, where trainees are made to hike into an outdoor situation and do a simulated nighttime rescue, with only the bare necessities for survival. It's the kind of training that helps them endure anything from the meadows of Marin, where they might be assisting with an evidence search, to the mountains of Yosemite, where they have been called upon to assist in mutual aid maneuvers and have participated in rescues of dangling climbers off the side of Half Dome.

MINIATURE BOOT CAMP

The training is like a miniature boot camp, and recruits are put to the test of their abilities to survive in the outdoors. They learn tracking techniques, how to rappel, how to make ice-cave shelters and they must also pass an intense background investigation.

The result is a dedicated corps of volunteers who don't flinch in the face of danger.

Whether it's searching for missing children or an Alzheimer's patient who has wandered away from safety, the group has assisted in finding hundreds of missing persons in the county and around the state for more than two decades.

It was while searching for a lost child in the hills of West Marin that the team's most long-term member, Mike St. John, remembers finding his calling in life. He was just 16 years old then, growing up in the remote community of Inverness.

A lost child had been reported in the Point Reyes seashore area, and the Marin County Search and Rescue team had been summoned to assist local law enforcement in finding her. St. John rose to the occasion and volunteered to assist the team, who he remembers having shown up in their old Chevy Suburban command post -- state of the art equipment at the time.

It was the adrenaline rush he felt while searching for the youth that convinced him that Search and Rescue was something he would really like to do.

Now, some 21 years later, the 37-year-old who works as a Mill Valley firefighter has participated in hundreds of rescues with the team and been a part of numerous life-saving efforts. He has also watched the squad go from a measly 12 volunteers when he started to the current head count of 60 members. St. John leads the team as well, and lectures to Search and Rescue squads from around the country on various training techniques and on how to organize an effective team.

"We've helped out on a lot of interesting cases," St. John said, reflecting on missing persons and evidence searches during the Trailside Killer case from 1979 to 1981, and the Polly Klaas case in Sonoma County in the '90s. "Search and Rescue is a great opportunity to be on the frontlines of emergency services and is a natural lead-in to a career in fire services or police work."

St. John has also developed an innovative new strategy for finding abducted children -- something he shares in his lectures at various SAR conventions. The strategy, which he didn't wish to share with the press should potential kidnappers catch wind of it, was used for the first time in the recent Xiana Fairchild abduction case in the East Bay.

"The sooner we get involved in a search the better," St. John said. "Searches for missing people can last as little as a few hours to as long as several days. Ideally, when a person is reported missing, you want to get called within hours."

St. John recalled that while there is presently a robust membership in the team, the group nearly disbanded in the late 1980s.

"Membership was low and interest was down," St. John said. "We were faced with two difficult searches -- the Alfred Solo search on Mount Tamalpais, and the search for a developmentally disabled man in Lagunitas. These two incidents brought the unit to the crossroads of giving it up or working hard to modernize the organization."

CALL VOLUME TRIPLES

Instead of throwing in the towel, St. John said the group voted to modernize and start new membership recruitment. Within weeks, they had 14 new members. They began an outdoor-training element and also began cross training with other search and rescue groups from around the state. As the group became better trained, call volume tripled from six calls per year to an average of 18. Its 60 members are now made up of about 30 teenagers and 30 adults.

Today the unit responds to more than 35 calls per year, has an annual budget from the county, a hangar at Hamilton Field in Novato, where they keep their 4x4 rescue truck, a transport van and command post truck.

The only thing St. John wishes, he said, is that there were some kind of a direct career track within Search and Rescue. While they fall under the umbrella of the Sheriff's Department for budgetary reasons, there are presently no paid positions within the unit.

A spokesman from the Marin County Sheriff's Department credits St. John with being the catalyst for bringing a new caliber of training and professionalism, and for having made the group one of the most well respected SAR squads in the state.

"The unit was almost nothing when it started," said Marin County Sheriff's Lt. Ken Froberg. "Mike St. John has been instrumental in bringing it to where it is today. It is one of the most finely trained, highly regarded Search and Rescue units in the state. The feedback we get from other agencies is tremendous."

"Some of the Search and Rescue members actually lose pay from their jobs when going out on these calls," Froberg said. "But they are willing to do that.

They take pride in getting involved and being there to help the community."

St. John said that the experience of being in a group like Search and Rescue is something anyone who is interested should experience.

"It's such a rite of passage to be part of this for young people," St. John said. "It's a self-esteem builder. You watch young people come in, get more responsibility and before too long they are leading a search effort. It's a great way to help people in need."